Beyond the Writer’s Block

I used to think writer’s block was a nonsense, until my publisher went into liquidation and the COVID 19 pandemic disrupted my usual sense of momentum and planning for a couple of years. I went through a looo-oong period of writer’s block. I had written and published five historical novels and a lot of other fiction and non-fiction, but now I started things and couldn’t take them anywhere. I tried many strategies but nothing seemed to work. 

I like L.M. Twist’s advice to writers in an interview posted today on the Historical Novel Society website:

‘Just keep swimming. Keep picking away at the story, the research, anything. Even if it feels like you’re hardly making any progress and it will never come together in a finished project; you can make it there, inch by inch.’

Launch: L.M. Twist’s Louis Mie and the Trial of Hautefaye

The book launch interviews on the HNS site contain many nuggets of good advice from writers to writers.

At last, I am on a writing roll again now, thanks to a decision to serialise my new novel, Love’s Knife, publishing one chapter a week on Substack. Chapter 3 coming this Saturday. You can subscribe for £5 per month giving you access to the full novel as it unfolds and a free ebook or paperback when it’s completed. Serialising has given me real writing momentum. You can also subscribe for free to receive occasional posts on my medieval history research and to read the novel prologue.

I also took the decision to set up my own imprint, Meanda Books, and have my backlist of five historical novels (and other writing) available again in hardback, paperback and ebook.

Now, I’m seeing Love’s Knife as the first in a series of ten books in the Trobairitz Sleuth series of medieval murder mysteries, and I’ve pick up the biography I’ve been working on (stop-start) of three medieval sisters. It’s good to get beyond the block and feel I merit the title of writer again!

Image: Alice Butt, c. 1895, by James McNeill Whistler, National Gallery of Art, Washington, public domain. This is one of Whistler’s paintings of London’s street children. The painting was stolen from Whistler’s Paris studio in the 1890s and he recovered it in 1901. Joseph Biden had the painting on loan and on display in his office for six years 2009-2015. The painting is the inspiration for my trobairitz sleuth character, Beatriz of Farrera. I first started imagining Beatriz in 2014 when I was writer in residence in Farrera in the Pyrenees.